


Sweet Dreams

by SciFiDVM



Series: In Your Dreams [1]
Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: From Pottsboro to Willoughby, Gen, Something had to give, This is My Head Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 17:32:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13299768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SciFiDVM/pseuds/SciFiDVM
Summary: Charlie and Bass on the road from Pottsboro to Willoughby. Charlie gets her first indication that maybe there's more to Monroe than she thought.





	Sweet Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> In the midst of writing some of the happier parts of Variables (it will be updated soon and finished not long after, I promise), I felt the need to go back to exploring the aspect of Charlie/Monroe that defines them for me, that dark hatred that gradually and unintentionally turned to respect and then more. So here is the first in a series of short (for me) stories that explore what I've always had as my head canon for their early days together.

She hated him. God, how she hated him. That hate had been the only thing that had kept her going for so long. It had carried her across the continent in multiple directions over the last year, and it had been her sole focus for the last few months. It was all his fault. EVERYTHING was his fault. He was a monster and he needed to be put down.

Why couldn’t she just lift the damn knife and do it?

Monroe laid on his bedroll in front of her, unguarded. Charlie had taken first watch, and he’d just laid down and gone to sleep. He hadn’t even taken her knife from her. Did he have a death wish? Did he underestimate her that much? Did he underestimate her hatred for him that much?

It had been two days since the drugs had started to wear off and she’d regained consciousness that first time. That was two days of riding next to him in the wagon that he’d stolen. Two days of him being unable to tolerate her spiteful silence and trying to fill the void of conversation with assertions that he wasn’t as bad as she thought, and that he really did want to help her family. She didn’t give credence to a single word of it. All lies, and she knew it. But she let him carry on, trying to convince her that she had him all wrong, that he could redeem himself. Never.

And here she sat for the second night in a row, watching his prone form, knife in hand, and unable to strike the fatal blow. Last night was excusable. The drugs weren’t fully out of her system, and she’d still felt weak. Tonight, there was no such justification. She felt fine, and he was still breathing. The seething fury in her chest fought to make her reconcile that incongruity. In a single swift movement of her hand, his throat could be laid open by her knife. He’d bleed to death on the dry, cracked earth on this nameless stretch of north Texas road, no one to save him and no one to mourn him.

It would be so easy. And yet, she hesitated. The knife hilt sat in her hand. The blade glinted in the light of their small fire, begging to be used. She’d planned to use it. Then, as she had steeled herself to take his life in cold-blooded retribution, he’d started to squirm in his sleep. After the agitated jerking motions came the whimpering. That was followed by the thrashing and crying out. It was the same as it had been the night before.

She watched his night terror grow and worsen, and her mind thought back to the bitter words she’d spat at him earlier that day. He’d been trying to justify something or other to her, to try and rationally excuse his inexcusable past actions. She’d blatantly dismissed his efforts. “You keep telling yourself whatever it takes to let you sleep at night.”

She watched the nightmare overcome him, and wondered what he saw. Which of his past atrocities plagued him enough to interrupt his sleep? Was it the same thing as last night? His heinous transgressions were not few. It could be any of a hundred horrific things he’d done.

She thought of the things that gave her nightmares. They were nothing that she had done. More like things that she had witnessed others do. Things done to the ones she loved, while she could do nothing. Things done because of or on the direct order of him. He was the reason for her nightmares.

He thrashed and flailed against the fabric of his bed roll, whatever imagined foe his subconscious forced him to face obviously getting the better of him. It mesmerized her. What does a living nightmare have nightmares about? How could a man she’d assumed to be so unconscionable be tormented by something? What terrified the Boogey Man? What regret refused to allow him to slumber peacefully?

She canted her head in wonder as she watched him writhe. So he did have regrets. That was unexpected. She’d assumed him to be incapable of such a sentiment. She would have never believed any words to that effect that would have come out of his mouth while conscious. But in his unconscious state of horror, he couldn’t lie to her. His nightmares were a window to his soul. That thought triggered something in her. So she now believed that he had a soul? Did she really believe that somewhere deep in his coal black heart was something human?

She did. Maybe that was too strong of a sentiment. But something deep inside of her had started to hope that there was. Now, beneath the beat of the war drums in her heart that pounded out a steady cadence of her hatred for him, below the vengeful thirst for his blood that called for her to kill him, there was a small and tiny voice. It was a quiet whisper that said, “save him”.

She scoffed at that stupid little voice. He was beyond saving. He deserved to die for what he had done. At best she would give him a stay of execution until she had let her family use him and unleash his destructive fury on the even worse enemy that threatened them. Then she would end him.

Her conscience gnawed at her. So what if she used him, used him to do the bloody and terrible work that he was good at, before discarding him? He’d done nothing to deserve any better treatment than that. That voice in her mind was back, the one that made the red hot glow of vengeful satisfaction turn instantly cold and hollow. What if there was a shred of humanity left in him? How much could she justify subjecting him to in the name of her cause? Using him this mercilessly was a slippery slope. At what point does it stop? At what point does she become the monster?

She looked down at him. His thrashing had progressed to simpering in a tightly balled up fetal position. It was pathetic. He wasn’t supposed to be pathetic. He was supposed to be a ruthless monster. He looked like nothing more than a broken man. She hated him even more in that instant, because he had taken away her ability to look at him as an emotionless caricature of everything evil and wrong in the world. For a brief second, she’d wanted to help the very tattered soul trapped beneath the rubble of a ruined life.

She stared at him as he finally stilled, and put her knife away. Letting herself become a monster to destroy a monster didn’t do any good in the grand cosmic balance. Maybe the best way to rid the world of her nemesis and his influence was to break the cycle of hate and killing. He had been Miles’s best friend once. His haunted dreamscape gave her hope that maybe that man was still in there somewhere. If she could find a way to bring that man back out in him, then the monster that was President Monroe would still be destroyed, just as surely as if she slit his throat.

She groaned. That was all easier said than done. She still couldn’t look at him without feeling a sense of revulsion and loathing mixed with a deeply ingrained twinge of fear. Trying to start over with a clean slate between them didn’t bring back her brother or father, and so the slate could never really be wiped clean. So she’d let herself keep hating the monster, as she tried to save the man. It was the best she could do for now.

With that thought, she stood and walked around to the other side of their little camp site, putting the small fire between her and his once again trembling form. She perched on a stump and looked through the fire at her nemesis-turned-ally as another round of nightmares overtook him. She smiled sardonically and whispered, “Sweet dreams, Monroe.”


End file.
